Part 7 (1/2)

If any otherdeclared that he would have walked out of the roo left with the impression--”she does not care for me” They had exerted themselves to please her, but felt that it was in vain; ”we couldn't penetrate, couldn't really _touch_ her” Once Browning ardens with her ar further was to come of it, at least they had seen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blest withal would have discredited their travel Only to Mrs Browning's mortification the spectacle wanted one detail indispensable to its coarette was absent: ”Ah, but I didn't see her s to desire

Before the close of June 1852 they were again in London, and found comfortable rooms at 58 Welbeck Street When the turmoil of the first days had subsided, they visited ”Kenyon the Magnificent”--so na--at Wi in life and passionate energy as in earlier days, was loud in his applause of the genius of Louis Napoleon Mazzini, his ”intense eyes full of s in co not only reh her feelings and her character[50] Florence Nightingale was also a welcoift of flowers Invitations froreen fields is seductive in a London month of July; but to remain in London was to be faithful to Penini--and to the much-travelled Flush Once the whole household, with Flush included, breathed rural air for two days with friends at Farnhasley, whose Christian Socialish, but as for the enial kindliness, Mrs Browning assures a correspondent that he could not be other than ”good and noble let him say or dream what he will” It is stated by Mr WM

Rossetti that Browning first became acquainted with his brother Dante Gabriel in the course of this suave him the manuscript of his unpublished poems of 1853 to read And Ruskin was now added to the number of his personal acquaintances ”We went to Den in September, ”to see the Turners--which, by the way, are divine I like Mr Ruskin entle, yet earnest--refined and truthful” At Lord Stanhope's they were introduced to the latest toy of fashi+onable occultism, the crystal ball, in which the seer beheld Oremus, the spirit of the sun; the supernatural was qualified for the faithful with luncheon and lobster salad; ”I love thefrankly declares And of terrestrial wonders, with heaven lying about them, and also India muslin and Brussels lace, tere seen in the babies of Monckton Milnes and Alfred Tennyson Pen, because he was ”troppo grande,” declined to kiss the first of these new-christened wonders, but Pen's father, ent alone to the baptis for some ten minutes and with accomplished dexterity, the future Governor-General of Australia

Yet with all these distractions, perhaps in part because of the's happiest ti to her rooms He was anxious, vexed, and worn[51] It was a happiness when Welbeck Street was left behind, and they were on the way by Paris to their resting-place at Casa Guidi Fro one of the Paris boulevards they witnessed, in a blaze of autulorified much military and civic po's handkerchief waved frantically while she prayed that God ht bless the people in this the chosen representative of a dehts on that memorable Saturday is not recorded, but we may be sure that they were less enthusiastic Yet he enjoyed the stir and ani life of the boulevards found Florence dull and dead--no change, no variety The journey by the Mont Cenis route had not been without its trying incidents At Genoa, during several days he was deeply depressed by the illness of his wife, who lay on the sofa and seemed to waste away But Casa Guidi was reached at last, where it was more like summer than November; the pleasant nest had its own peculiar welcoain they enjoyed the sunsets over the Arno, and Mrs Browning was able to report herself free fro very well and very happy: ”You can't think hoe have caught up our ancient traditions just where we left them, and relapsed into our former soundless, stirless, her from home since we came--just as if we had never known Paris”[52]

The political condition of Italy was, indeed, a grief to both husband and wife It was a state of utter prostration--on all sides ”the unanimity of despair” The Grand Duke, the emancipator, had acquired a respect and affection for the bayonets of Austria The Pope riggling his venoht and action” Browning groaned ”How long, O Lord, how long?” His holand in contrast with Italy were those of patriotism and pride His as more detached, more critical towards her native land The best syy to act, she yet had energy to hate To be happy now they both ains possible fro was already occupied with the poems included afterwards in the volued upon _Aurora Leigh_ ”We neither of us show our work to one another,” she wrote, ”till it is finished An artist must, I fancy, either find or _ood work at all” But as her husband's poems, one by one, were completed, she saw the he had done Away in England _Coloe, with Helen Faucit in the leading part It was at least an indication that the public had not forgotten that Browning was a poet Here in Florence, although the herland--added to its happiness Frederick Tennyson, the Laureate's brother, and hiree, ”a dreamy, shy, speculative man,” simple withal and truthful, had married an Italian wife and was settled for a tienuine affection Mrs Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she tells ian word--”selfhood, the _propriuh left in a state of bewilder's poetry, found the writer of the poetry ”a , jest and bonho heart that reverbs no hollowness”[53] Another intilish e, very gentle and refined, delicate and excitable, full of sensibility, ”full of all sorts of goodness and nobleness,” but soh,”

writes Mrs Browning, ”to suit me,” interested moreover in spiritualism, which suited her well, ”never,” she unwisely prophesied, ”to be a great diplomatist” It was hardly, Mr Kenyon, the editor of her letters, observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of Lord Lytton, the future Ambassador at Paris and Viceroy of India[54]

Early in 1853 Mrs Browning became much interested in the reports which reached her-- spirits,” who in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in the way they should not go ”You know I am rather a visionary,” she wrote to Miss Mitford, ”and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out” Her Swedenborgian studies had prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the visible and the invisible worlds which did not pered from the other A clever person who loves the ic that s in the world Should we not credit human testis? Should we not investigate alleged facts? Should we not keep an open mind? We cannot but feel a certain sympathy with a woman of ardent nature who fails to observe the bounds of intellectual prudence Browning himself with all his audacities was pre-eminently prudent He did not actively enter into politics; he did not dabble in pseudo-science; he was an artist and a thinker; and hein clay, and the study ofsquandered her enthusiasnant energy of co, e man It is often the clever people ould be entirely rational and unprejudiced that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their folly A fine old crusted prejudice cole act of an individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain an equal sum of wisdom Scientific discovery is not advanced by a enious amateurs in learned folly Whether the clai, gifted as she ith rare powers of ate those claiy, from which she could not but suffer serious risks and certain loss

Before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer--a believer, as she describes it, on testimony The fact of communication with the invisible world appeared to herthat had been communicated The spirits themselves ”seem abundantly foolish, oneprepared for soreat development of truth She would keep her eyes wide open to facts and her soul lifted up in reverential expectation By-and-by she felt the du with humatism of Faraday in an inadequate theory was simply unscientific, a piece of intellectual tyranny The A the world upside down in London with this spiritual influx” Twoand her husband were the a seance at Ealing Miss de Gaudrion (afterwards Mrs Merrifield), as present on that occasion, and as convinced that the ” for an expression of her opinion The reply, as enuine character of the phenomena; such manifestations, she admitted, in the undeveloped state of the subject were ”apt to be low”; but they were, she was assured, ”the beginning of access from a spiritual world, of which we shall presently learnaccompanied that of his wife

He had, he said, to overco the subject; he could hardly understand how another opinion was possible than that ”the whole display of 'hands,' 'spirit utterances,' etc, was a cheat and irain of worldly wisdooes on, ”has, however, abundant experience that the best and rarest of natures in by the properwhen eation of the regular tests of truth and rationality in favour of these particular experiments, and end in a voluntary prostration of the whole intelligence before what is assuence

Once arrived at this point, no trick is too gross--absurdities are referred to 'low spirits,' falsehoods to 'personating spirits'--and the one terribly apparent spirit, the Father of Lies, has it all his oay” These interesting letters were communicated to _The Times_ by Mr Merrifield (_Literary Supplement_, Nov 28, 1902), and they called forth a short additional letter fro, the ”Penini” of earlier days He mentions that his father had hiar fraud; that Hos, and was turned out of it Mr Browning adds: ”What, however, I a is that towards the end of her life my mother's views on 'spiritual e was brought about, in great measure, by the discovery that she had been duped by a friend in whoreat, but her eyes were opened and she saw clearly”[55] Itsix e of feeling, but she admits that ”sublime communications” from the other world are ”decidedly absent,” and that while no truth can be dangerous, unsettled ether the subject of spiritualis's hostility arose primarily from his conviction that the so-called ”manifestations” were, as he says, a cheat and i under the table while at work in producing ”phenomena” He had visited his friend, Sey at the trance of a peasant girl named Mariana; and when Kirkup withdrew for a ue of her posturing, at the sa with a wink to be a charitable confederate in the joke by which she profited in adable war against the London dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception But his feeling was intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional ar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who becahted rooenius hbourhood to her of nised her right to think for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as rather his misfortune than his crime

It was a considerable ti's study of the ie the Medium,”

appeared in the _Dramatis Personae_ of 1864; the date of its composition is Rome, 1859-60; but the observations which that study sue is not a portrait of Hoe no doubt supplied suggestions for the poet's character-study Browning evidently wrote the poes; its irip never slackens If the Bishop, who orders his tolory and the moral void of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity, does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century uish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions Unhappily the later poelier in its the, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when he wrote _The Alchemist_, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted the subject to the dregs The writer's zeal from first to last knows no abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a dee the Medium” is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a dra, with his des of theIf the poem is a satire, it is so only in a way that is inevitable Browning's desire is to be absolutely just, but sometimes truth itself becomes perforce a satire He takes an ie; the ”; he will make a clean breast of it; and his confession is made as nearly as possible a vindication The most contemptible of creatures, in desperate straits, er; the poetry of the piece is to be found in the lithe attitudes, absolutely the best possible under the circumstances, by which he ia_ is a criticism not of those who feast fools in their folly, but of the fools who require a caterer for the feast; it is a study of the methods by which dupes solicit and educate a knave The other half is Sludge's plea that, knave though he be, he is not wholly knave; and Browning, while absolutely rejecting the doctrine of so called spiritualise there enters a certain portion of truth, low in degree, perverted in kind, inoperative to the ends of truth, yet a fragment of that without which life itself were ianisreedy, effe upon the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentiar er than the wronged Who h in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained hih his blunders with ingenious excuses--”the e is hie phenorown confused in their communications”?

Who proceeded to exhibit hi their vanity on the success of his imposture? Who awakened in hied hinificent lies? Who fed and flattered hie? And now and again in his course of fraud did he not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterderant lived in freedo a soul so!

And in the ulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived cheating is so ”cruel easy” The difficulty is rather that the cheating, even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is The medium has confessed! Yes, and to cheat may be part of the ift of acting as a conductor between the visible and the invisible worlds Has he not told secrets of the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by natural e chuckles ”could not?”--could not be known by hi passivity is alive at every nerve with the instinct of the detective, by hi thus His sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue, Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible, And when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures--slick, Their juice enriched his palate ”Could not Sludge!”

Haunters of the seance of every species are his aiders and abettors--the unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine h the natural love of it, the amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with superstition, the literary man elcomes a new flavour for the narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, ants the chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his faculty Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the patrons who have corrupted and debased hiratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute To the greenhorn and the bully

The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other than the truculence of Robert Browning, ”shaking his ainst the spiritualists, ”with occasional foarain of truth which has vitality ae's nature? Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be sure ”but there was so in it, tricks and all” The spiritual world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in great things, God is present Sludge is aware of the invisible powers at every nerve:

I guess what's going on outside the veil, Just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-ti by hiht As if your back yard were a plot of spice

He cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind to Or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a ger as this a self-desecration, if you will; but still e, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth? At the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor , so iht into fruitful connection with a future existence? This world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it be pervaded by an influx froible it all grows! And is the faculty of is of the spirit--put to his own uses by the poet and even the historian--is this a pohich cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives it play?

Browning's design is to exhibit even in this Sludge the rudiments--coarse, perverted, abnorood--of that sublime spiritual wisdohest intellectual powers, is present--to take a lofty exe and the Book_ It is not through spiritualisrain of truth; that has only darkened the gliht which was in him Yet liar and cheat and coward, he is saved from a purely phantasmal existence by this fibre of reality which was part of his original structure The epilogue--Sludge's outbreak against his corrupter and tor, no cleansing, no really illu power remains in what is now only a putrescent lue is natural and drae would be to his honour This is a base and poisonous passion with no virtue in it, and the passion, flaring for a raceful gains

[Illustration: THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS STAYED

_Froraph_]

The su and his wife, as they had spent the same season four years previously, at the Baths of Lucca Their house a the hills was shut in by a row of plane-trees in which by day the cicale were shrill; at evening fireflies lit up their garden The green rushi+ng river--”a flashi+ng scih the es on the peaks of the hts